The quote of note comes from The Skeptic's Dictionary

Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko's methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin's death.

See Scientific American for more.

Genesis Through the Back Door

November 20, 2004

American high school seniors rank 16th among 21 industrialized nations when it comes to achievement in science, and you can bet a frozen mastodon that the leaders — Sweden, the Netherlands, Iceland and Norway — got there with a stronger curriculum and better-trained teachers, not with endless court fights over creationism.

Yet fighting creationism has evolved into a booming business for the American Civil Liberties Union. It is awaiting a ruling in Georgia in a suit it brought against the Cobb County school board. Seeking to mollify religious parents who take the creation story in Genesis literally and believe that their religion should intrude into their public schools, the board decided to paste a sticker inside the cover of high school biology textbooks, saying in part, "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things." Caveat homo sapiens. What next? A back-cover sticker to American history texts wondering if ending slavery was really such a great idea?

…Far more troubling was last month's decision by the Dover, Pa., school board to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that the required teaching of creationism as science violated the 1st Amendment. Trying to disguise creationism with the label of "intelligent design" (which sounds like an IKEA marketing pitch) doesn't pass the smell test — or any valid science test.